Jeffrey Scholes

Jeffrey Scholes is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is the author of Vocation and the Politics of Work (Lexington 2013) and Religion and Sports in American Culture with Raphael Sassower (Routledge 2014).

When FoxNews.com’s Lauren Green repeatedly pressed Reza Aslan, a Muslim, on why he wrote a book on Jesus, she was, without knowing it, putting the role of religious studies scholarship on a grand stage.

Rather than attributing Holmes’ and the Joker’s nonexistent moral compass (and neither seems to have one) to an absence of moral training that would be there if prayer were back in public schools, we may need to look at their apparent lack of a self-conscious narrative as a more telling source.